Author, keynote speaker, and customer experience consultant. Expert in customer service, the customer experience, customer centricity, hospitality, and building a customer-centric corporate culture. My most recently published title is "High-Tech, High-Touch Customer Service." I'm an entrepreneur myself with a background in manufacturing, entertainment, marketing. I'm based in metro Seattle when not traveling. Reach me at 484-343-5881 or micah@micahsolomon.com

Customer Service Tip: That Whiny Complaining Customer? She's Actually A Gift From The Gods

A customer who brings up two, three, even four complaints in a row is just a whiner, right? The problem has to be the customer, not your customer service experience, it would seem.

But the weird thing is, complaints about your customer service or your product sometimes come in threes. Or fours. All from the same customer.

You address the first error, and there’s another one, or two, or three complaints right behind it, from the same customer.

What gives? Is this customer someone with unreasonable expectations? Someone who was never an appropriate customer for your business in the first place?

Maybe. Customer mismatches certainly happen: the guest at your steakhouse, for example, who throws a tantrum because she doesn’t understand why you only have four vegan options on the menu.

But often something else is going on when a customer finds not just one error, but three. Before your customer discovered that first problem, your company walked on water. But with that first mistake, your company’s halo fell off. You went from “they can do no harm” to “they’ve already done me harm; what else do I have to watch out for? And flaws that were previously obscured come into focus.

The information (couched as complaints) that your customer will give you in this sensitized state is extremely valuable. This is a magical, if painful, moment. The sensitized customer will be attuned to pointing out things that none of your employees are likely to notice in the course of their routine day. That few of your regular customers consciously notice, even if it is grinding down, over time, their subconscious opinion of the customer experience you provide.

In their sensitized state, in other words, these disgruntled customers become your supertasters of service.

The problem is these people seem like whiners. Even like kvetch factories. So they are easy to dismiss by thinking, “hey, almost nobody has a problem with our service, why did he just find four? Must be his problem, not ours.”

But try to be all ears in a situation like this, because you have very, very few customers who will bring this stuff up in such detail. Most of your customers are trying to be polite. To not cause trouble or be a bother. Or, most tragically, don’t care enough to speak up because they’ve already written you off.

By contrast, the two-time, three-time, four-time complainer is a gift. An unpleasant, awkward gift. But a gift you can take to the bank. If you’ll open your ears, and attitude, and listen.

Micah Solomon is a customer service consultant, keynote speaker, and bestselling author.

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Micah, I totally agree with you. A dissatisfied customer could just as easily walked away, never intent on doing business with you again. And you would never have known that the same issues could alienate other customers. I am convinced, as you are, that people who complain are a gift. As Bill Gates said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

I have personally found that almost all complainers who felt that someone listened to them and took immediate action to fix it became loyal repeat customers and over time, turned out to be the loudest brand advocates.

Thank you, and very well said. Yes, as long as they’re complaining, you’re in the game–but you aren’t if they quietly leave. And beyond that, as you say, without their observations you won’t know what is alienating the other customers, the quiet walk-awayera.